Reviews, April 2017

RuneQuest, Second Edition —
Steve Perrin & Ray Turney

My
first year at university, I encountered my first roleplaying games;
two of those games I still remember fondly. Well, perhaps three, but
I’ll explain that in a footnote [1]. The first game was Traveller,
which I reviewed here. The second was Chaosium’s RuneQuest,
2nd Edition.
Which is now in print again, thank Ghu.

Like
Traveller,
RuneQuest
is
a skill-based system. Like Traveller,
the skills that count are somewhat mundane. However, unlike
Traveller, whose
basic rule set was quite unspecific about the setting, RuneQuest was
explicitly set in Greg
Stafford’s Glorantha.

I
should perhaps add that both games, unlike a lot of role-playing
games then and now, are designed to put wandering murder hobos at a
considerable disadvantage. Just in case you wondered.

Chiho Saito
Revolutionary Girl Utena, book 1

The collective Be-Papas
and Chiho Saito’s [1] Revolutionary
Girl Utena, Volume 1
is the first of two volumes in the Revolutionary
Girl Utena Complete Deluxe Box Set. Utena first
ran in the monthly manga magazine Ciao
from 1996–1997. Translation is by Lillian Olsen.

Rescued
as a child from drowning by a mysterious stranger Utena knows only as
“Licky-lick” [2], Utena vowed to be worthy of her savior, the man
she yearns to meet again. She will live a strong and noble life.

Gehenna: Death Valley —
Becka Kinzie

To
quote Becka Kinzie’s website:

I’m
a freelance artist from the K-W Region. I’ve also been working as a
colour flatter and colouring assistant since the early 2010s. In my
spare time, I create my own macabre series of comics, which are
posted online. The pages are eventually made into comic book issues,
and so far I have self-published 15 of them (for sale at
events/conventions).

Kinzie’s
on-going horror webcomic
Gehenna:
Death Valley
is one of several to be found on her website.

Teenagers!
Just how blatant do warnings have to be before teens will actually
pay heed? In the case of Lauren, Max, Sean, Max and Anika, more
blatant than this.

An Ancient Peace —
Tanya Huff
Peacekeeper, book 1

Set
in the same Confederation universe as her Valor novels, 2015’s An
Ancient Peace is the first volume in Tanya Huff’s Peacekeeper series.

A
covert op seems like a useful application of the skills of Torin
Kerr’s elite squad … as well as a welcome distraction from the
revelation that the war that killed so many was an enigmatic
civilization’s science project. And it’s not as if the op is
unimportant: the future of the human and other Younger races may
depend on what it finds.

The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047 —
Lionel Shriver

Lionel
Shriver’s 2016 The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047 is
the third in a series of reviews … a series I am increasingly coming to
repent ever having begun.

When
investors decline to continue funding America’s soaring debt, the
US’s foreign-born Latino President decides the only acceptable
solution is to default on the debts. The consequences will
reverberate for decades.

Many
members of the implausibly named Mandible family used to take comfort
from the knowledge that when their irascible patriarch finally died,
his fortune would be divided among them. But the collapse of the US
dollar (and the American economy with it) has stripped the old man of
most of his assets. His remaining assets have lost most of their
value. The Mandibles and America with them will be forced to do
something unthinkable: adapt to changing circumstances.

Cloned Lives —
Pamela Sargent

1976’s
Cloned
Lives was
Pamela Sargent’s debut novel.

Paul
Swenson and his friends see a brief window of opportunity for
biomedical experimentation: technology has advanced, antique rules
preventing certain lines of research have expired. Assuming that it
is better to ask forgiveness than ask permission, they only reveal
their project to the world once they have the first successful
results to show. Who are:

The Homeward Bounders —
Diana Wynne Jones

Protagonist
Jamie’s unremarkable life ended the day he stumbled across Them
playing
games with human destiny. Luckily for Jamie, the rules of the game
include provisions for pieces who know too much, as Jamie does. Jamie
was discarded from the game, consigned to wander between realities as
a Bounder until he could find his way back home.

Icarus Down —
James Bow

To
quote James Bow’s website:

I was born in downtown Toronto on April 19, 1972 and lived there
until my folks moved up to Kitchener in 1991 so I could attend the
University of Waterloo. I’ve lived in Kitchener ever since. I’ve
been trained as an urban planner, and I’ve worked as a database
manager, web designer, circulation manager, administrative assistant,
layout designer, and office manager. The one consistent thing about
my varied academic and professional career has been a love of
writing.

Three
generations ago, the colonists on the starship Icarus
emerged from their final jump and found themselves plunged into
disaster. The travellers had been promised a garden world. What they
got was a hellworld whose electromagnetic environment killed
electronics and where the sun was bright enough to burn unprotected
skin. The fog-shielded lowlands seemed to offer a haven, … at least
until the ticktock monsters attacked. The colonists were forced into
refuges suspended between lethal sunlight and deadly monsters. Until
now, they have survived.

Simon
Daud wanted to be a pilot. Catastrophic equipment failure on his
final test flight left Simon badly burned. His brother Isaac was
killed outright.

Blade of p’Na —
L. Neil Smith

Four
hundred million years of civilization is long enough for a race like
the Elders to have developed some very odd hobbies. Among the
avocations the nautiloid Elders dabbled in was Appropriating doomed
or interesting beings from neighbouring universes. This did not end
so well for the Elders in question (who committed suicide once they
noticed the inherent contradiction between their ethic of ‘freedom
for all!’ and ‘kidnapping’ [1]) but it has worked out pretty
well for the Appropriated and their descendants.

A Spell for Chameleon —
Piers Anthony
Xanth, book 1

1977’s British Fantasy Award-winning
A
Spell for Chameleon is the first volume in Piers Anthony’s seemingly endless Xanth
series.

Spoiler warning.

Poor
Bink! Each human Xanth has their own unique magical gift. Bink
appears to be one of the few exceptions, with no discernible magical
talent. Not only does this place him at a considerable disadvantage
to his fellow humans but it will cost him his place in Xanth. Human
law mandates exile for those without magic.

On
the slim chance the Good Magician Humfrey’s powers can uncover the
talent all previous attempts to discover have failed to spot, Bink
set out to offer a year of service to the Magician in exchange for
Humfrey’s help.

Hellmaw: Soul Larcenist —
Suzanne Church
Dagger of Sacrados, book 1

Suzanne
Church’s 2016 supernatural thriller Hellmaw:
Soul Larcenist is book one in the Dagger
of Sacrados Trilogy.
It is set in Ed
Greenwood’s shared universe, Hellmaw.

Called
to the scene of a spectacularly brutal double homicide, protagonist
Detective Sergeant Windsor Kane has no idea that she and her husband
Davian are being stalked by the killer. By the time she does figure
that out, she and Davian have been overpowered, kidnapped, and
prepared for a slow, painful death.

Hiromu Arakawa
Fullmetal Alchemist, book 2

Viz’
Fullmetal
Alchemist (3-in-1 Edition), Volume 2 includes
Volumes 4, 5, 6 of the original Japanese manga [1]. Story and art are
by Hiromu Arakawa; English translation by Akira Watanabe; English
adaptation, by Jake Forbes and Egan Loo; touch-up art & lettering
by Wayne Truman.

The
first thing a stranger might notice about Edward Elric is his
prosthetic arm and leg. The first thing they might notice about
Edward’s younger brother Al is his huge metal body. More on those
detail later. Both are skilled alchemists. Both are not yet
teenagers. Both are members of a military organization, trading
service for training.

As
Volume 2 of the omnibus edition opens, Al and Ed have gotten their
asses soundly kicked by a stabby, shape-shifting woman named Envy and
her minions [2]. Death is a distinct possibility.

The Core of the Sun —
Johanna Sinisalo

2013’s The Core of the Sun is
a standalone dystopian novel by Johanna Sinisalo. First published in
Finnish, the 2016 English edition was translated by Lola Rogers. It’s
also the first of four reviews of 2017 Prometheus Nominees (I sure
hope I have written the intro for the series of reviews by the time
this review is posted).

The
Eustitocratic Republic Finland is a utopia … or so it assures its
citizens. If you cannot trust an intrusive, nanny-state that goes to
extraordinary lengths to isolate its people from the outside world,
whom can you trust? The people of Finland live healthy, properly
ordered lives, unlike the legions of unfortunates trapped in
hedonistic, decadent democracies.

The
key to this dazzling success is the proper domestication of women.

A Closed and Common Orbit —
Becky Chambers
Wayfarers, book 2

2016’s
Hugo nominee A
Closed and Common Orbit is
the second novel
in
Becky Chambers’ Wayfarers series.

Forced
by circumstance to abandon her life as the mind of a starship,
artificial intelligence Lovelace is re-homed in an android body. She
adopts a new identity as Sidra. Life in a humanoid shell, tottering
precariously on two legs and dealing with complex, unfamiliar social
protocols, is challenging.

She
meets Pepper, who is eager to help Sidra learn to cope. Unlike many
others, Pepper believes that artificial intelligences are people. Why
does Pepper have this peculiar and economically inconvenient belief?

Tales of Known Space: The Universe of Larry Niven —
Larry Niven

1975’s Tales of Known Space: the Universe of Larry Niven was
Larry Niven’s sixth collection (if you don’t count the
British-only
Inconstant
Moon
and
the Dutch
De Stranden van Sirius Vier) or
his eighth (if you do.). It is the fourth instalment in an informal
series I call “the essential collections of Larry Niven [1], being
an irregular review series I may not even get around to finishing or
continuing” (or tagging or giving its own formal series name in the sidebar).

An
unkind reviewer might call this “the Known Space stories that
weren’t good enough to make it into
Neutron
Star.
”
That’s not entirely true … but Niven himself acknowledges that a
couple of the stories are not very good. Rather than bury them and
try to conceal that they ever existed, he opted for completism
(although it took another couple of collections to accomplish
that
goal).

There’s
a very good reason beyond being a Niven fanboy as a teen that I
picked this up. I will explain my reasoning at the end of the review.

Ascending —
James Alan Gardner
League of Peoples, book 5

To
quote Wikipedia (because if Jim’s
site has a bio section, I am missing it):

James
Alan Gardner (born January 10, 1955) is a Canadian science fiction
author. Raised
in Simcoe
and Bradford,
Ontario,
he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in applied mathematics from
the University
of Waterloo.

Gardner
has published science fiction short stories in a range of
periodicals, including The
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
and Amazing
Stories.
In 1989, his short story “The Children of Creche” was
awarded the Grand Prize in the Writers
of the Future
contest. Two years later his story “Muffin Explains Teleology to
the World at Large” won a Prix
Aurora Award;
another story, “Three Hearings on the Existence of Snakes in the
Human Bloodstream,” won an Aurora and was nominated for both the
Nebula
and Hugo
Awards.

Ascending is the fifth book in James Alan Gardner’s League
of Peoples series.

To
quote its protagonist, the transparent glass woman Oar:

This
is my story, the story of Oar. It is a wonderful story. I was in
another story once, but
it was not so wonderful, as I died in the end. That was very most sad
indeed. But it turns out I am not such a one as stays dead forever,
especially when I only fell eighty floors to the pavement.

Oar’s
people are physically immortal, but their minds, sadly, are not.
Given time, they lapse into catatonia, living but inert. There is no
way to cure the condition nor is there any way to avoid it except dying.

iD —
Madeline Ashby
Machine Dynasty, book 2

Madeline
Ashby’s 2016 Company
Town is a standalone science fiction novel that has received enough
acclaim—in large part due to its position in Canada Reads—that I have as yet been unable to obtain a copy [1].
That is why this is a review of her 2013 novel, iD.

iD is the second instalment in Madeline Ashby’s Machine
Dynasty series.

Every
von Neumann robot that has ever been built comes with an infallible
fail-safe that will kill the robot deader than the dodo if the robot
fails to protect and serve their humans. Every robot save Amy, that is. Amy’s failsafe does not work. What’s worse from the human
point of view is that vN robots spawn copies unless actively
prevented; all of Amy’s iterations will have similarly defective failsafes.

There
is an easy solution: simply kill Amy. Or rather, use her lover
Javier’s failsafe to compel him to do it for the humans.

Orbital Cloud —
Taiyo Fujii

Taiyo
Fujii’s Orbital
Cloud is
a standalone science fiction thriller. Originally published in 2014
under the title Ōbitaru
Kuraudo, Orbital Cloud was translated into English by Timothy Silver. The Haikasoru edition
was published in March 2017.

Even
in 2020, putting objects into orbit is still the domain of national
governments and billionaires. Observation of objects in orbit, on the
other hand, is something well within the grasp of the motivated
amateurs like Kazumi
Kimura’s website Meteor News. Meteor News, focused on shooting star
prediction, is among the first to notice SAFIR 3’s bizarre behaviour.

Earthblood —
Rosel George Brown & Keith Laumer

The
Keith Laumer and Rosel George Brown 1966 collaboration Earthblood
is
a standalone space opera.

Although
Roan’s adopted father Raff was only a mutant human, and his adopted
mother Bella a lowly Yill. Roan himself was a true-blooded
pure-strain Terran—something not seen in the galaxy since the
Imperial Terran Navy was swept from the skies by the Niss, five
thousand years earlier. Where Roan came from, and how he found his
way to a backwater world like Tambool, neither Raff nor Bella can
guess. What they do know is they love their adopted son and intend to
raise him as best they can.

But
in a galaxy populated by mutants and aliens, can there be room for
even one true human?